The BBC only licences programs to be broadcast within a 7 day window, which is why the DRM is required for the IMP to get off the ground. For programs the BBC produces it is their choice if they want to make them available for longer, but I dare say that few of them are 100% BBC these days - news probably contains clips from other providers, sport broadcasts are probably licenced from the people hosting the event etc.
It makes sense to do away with having your console being the place where your saves games are and tie it to an on line player profile. Mobile profiles are possible with memory cartrages but it involves hassle. Being able to continue your Halo campaign around your friends place by entering your login details is far nicer than having to take anything physical with you.
The possiblilty of custom settings for all your games being instantly accessable to you as long as you have a net connection is a great idea, but I don't know if MS are removing the hard disk for this reason. It is possible that because they are moving into the home entertainment business they will want to sell you a PVR as well. If this was a software addon to the XBox 2 then you could pirate it, but it is harder when there is no hard disk. If they get the PVR expansion to authenticate against the XBox 2 (which would basically be a video in and a hard disk in a matching box) then they keep the option secure. Of course you would have to hack your XBox 2 to get the new encoder working if they did hardware authentication anyway, but as has been pointed out no hard disk is a great cost saving. Selling a hard disk as an extra to turn your XBox 2 into a media centre (for which they all ready have an OS) is a good business idea. Of course nobody will want one if it is as ugly as the current XBox.
Myself I will stick with emulating classics and MythTV (when I get it working, KnoppMyth will either receive praise or curses tomorrow when I erase Windows from my PVR).
Konspire2b looks like a better option than BitTorrent for distributing news. You could have a channel mapping to an RSS feed and just wait for the news to come to you. No polling intervals and low bandwidth requirements for the operator. With BitTorrent you still have to poll for updates and this removes that requirement.
Remember that putting email addresses in pictures meens that only people who can read the picture can email you. This excludes anyone who has their computer read the screen for them from contacting you. It is far better to have a contact form on your site that emails you - it will still hide the email address. If you have a domain and want to use a mailto then you can simply change the contact email address when it gets too drowned in SPAM and either bounce messages or simply delete them using your favourite mail processor.
If you want to not only filter out SPAM easily but also track who sold out then get a domain and when you sign up for something that requires an email address then put an ID in the address you use, for example user-site_url@domain.com - this way you can filter out spam from just one source and also stop reading (and thus supporting) junk mail from the offending web site. You can even sue the pants off the web site if the law permits and you really care that much.
Forget the mobo - AGPx4 Vs AGPx8 doesn't make a huge difference at the moment with games, and even if the NV30 cards drop to $200 I would still like to be able to hear the lovingly created sound track by Trent Reznor - go for the $180 ATI card - it is better for your ears ^_^
Well according to this it just spams Gnutella clients! I wouldn't bother if I were you, unless you want irritated users disconnecting you from the network.
eDonkey 2000 / http://www.sharereactor.com do this. The eDonkey network works by using links (as in clickable on web pages) that contain MD4 sums of the file + file size to let users know about files on the network. It does have some searching capabilities but they are limited. This is persumably fixed in the new Overnet project the guy is doing.
The files are all downloaded in segments from multiple sources, and you sometimes get bad segments, but they are only a fraction of the total file size so you don't really care.
You just plain can't poison eDonkey / Overnet - it won't work. It is also the only network that I would be tempted to use to distribute real content since it is guaranteed that the user will get what you want them to.
If you have these keys, the security is broken completely and you can do whatever you want. Getting them is the hard part.
This is, as I understand it, not completely the case. I doubt that the Pd machine would let unsigned software have access to storage that it is not allowed to. You could get around this if you take the hard disk out of the Pd machien and put it in a non-Pd machine of course. You are then in a situation that if you want to circumvent the DRM on a file then you have to pull out the disk it is stored on and decrypt the file. If you used a VM then you wouldn't have to do that. You wouldn't even need a Pd PC if you could get a key (say, from your X-Box 2).
It is more a case of if you can create valid Pd keys, then you are home free.
If you can't (MS distributes them, and signs them, with signatures publicly available for all keys linked to UIN's or something) then you could, for instance, use the trick of differential power analysis to identify the key (which is fixed in most smart cards these days, but used to be a problem) then you can clone a Pd system. If you owned the system, then who would know?
As long as you decrypt stuff and erase any signing / watermarks etc, you can upload stuff to P2P systems if you want. I wasn't thinking of that though, just creating a system to allow fair use. I won't go into the fair use rant here because I am sure eveyone has heard it many times before.
The latest Crypto-Gram has some things to day about Pd, or Palladium as the full name goes. It is interesting, but it doesn't say anything about somthing that sprang to my mind - the possibility of a virtual machine that runs as a Pd device, on top of a non-Pd device, completely breaking the security. This would be hard to do I expect, but not impossible. Those who have written VmWare and similar programs probably have it in them to reverse engineer the protocols used and re-produce them in software, for the sake of argument call it VmPd.
It goes like this:
VmPd runs on a PC, VmPd contains all keys required to access all areas of itself. VmPd is trusted, because it is a trusted PC (which is the point of this whole mess) to do what it is expected to do. For the sake of argument assume we have downloaded The Little Mermaid under license from Disney, and we are only allowed to play it once. We turn off VmPd, and all we have is an encrypted jumble on our hard disk where we set up the partition to host it. We also have the keys to read it though, and simply decrypt the move and show it to our hypothetical little children as many times as we like.
This works because, as I understand it, Pd only allows you to access material with certain rights, depending on what access partition it is under. If Disney set up an access partition for downloading movies, this will be done in a way that trusts your Pd machine.
Assuming that Disney only give you a key when you pay for one, that key will always work unless they can chance how the movie is encrypted. It is conceivable that they would have a player that on-the-fly re-encrypts the movie with a new public key as you view it, every time you view it, and they only give you the new private key when you pay for it. But the transmission of the key is encrypted, trusted because you have a Pd device, so you just intercept the key on its way into VmPd, don't play the movie, and decrypt it yourself and watch as many times as you like.
I am probably missing something, but it makes for interesting thinking.
I am sure I have heard of someone doing this before in software, but I can't find a link. It should be quite simple to do if you know bit widths and track diameters I guess. As long as Yamaha haven't patented it I can see this turning up as a plug in for CD writer software quite quickly.
This will probably start turning up on ISO's soon, and it would be cool to have a nice Debianmini-CD ISO hacked to say "Woody" in the unused space! Of course, now we have the possible pain of ISO adverts...
Re:GTK Seems solid, but slow on Solaris
on
GTK-- vs. QT
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· Score: 1
I will give that a go. Basically I ran./configure and make it. Silly of me to assume that since it runs like a pig without the mit-shm option, it would build with it enabled by default!
GTK Seems solid, but slow on Solaris
on
GTK-- vs. QT
·
· Score: 2, Informative
...but a little slow on Solaris 8. Maybe it is just me, but my build of Mozilla really jerkey on a workstation (UltraSPARK III, 2G RAM). On the other hand The Gimp runs like a dream on my Windows box, and Mozilla is zappy on Linux.
They have made evolutionary electronic devices. I seem to remember it was a New Scientist article but I don't have a copy to hand. An FPGA was trained to differentiate between two frequencies, which was accomplished with far fewer gates than traditional designes, and the final array contained a block of gates that weren't linked to the main block, which if removed stopped the device from functioning.
If you have a donation drive like twice a year, like a telethon, only the crippled kids are the servers, and the old guys tapdancing are rob and jeff, i think it would go over great.
OK, but I want to see Rob and Jeff tapdancing:)
Come on! This has to happen! Rob and Jeff host a telethon webcast[1], complete with slow, soft focus pictures of the Slashdot servers with CG smoke coming out of them... of course since they will be in the same place to get behind a web-cam together to do this show they could do another Geeks In Space! *g,dr*
[1] I know this will cost bandwidth, but stick with it, my story gets better.
Most comments posted so far are looking at this from the point of view of people creating different laws for Cyberspace. This isn't really in the spirit of the ruling. The point is that Voyeur Dorm wasn't selling sexually explicit material in a particular area where it was banned. This doesn't mean that I, in the UK, can import pr0n on the net, and say it is OK because it is in cyberspace. The point is that cyberspace sales don't affect the people in the area directly by changing the atmosphere of the area (the law that was being challenged was to do with keeping sales of a sexually explicit nature away from residential areas, because it changes the mood of the area for the worse). You can't just use this ruling to say "DECSS doesn't break the law, because the law doesn't apply to cyberspace", the law does (in all the places I know of at any rate).
PGP is still very good encryption, and I use it regularly. I mostly use it on my Win2k box, but GPG will do the same job under Linux.
As for how easy it is to use, on Windows it is on the file context menu, allowing you to encrypt and erase files in just a couple of clicks. In Outlook you can tell it to encrypt / sign your emails automatically for you.
This ease of use is not limited to Windows though, GPG plugs into Mutt as well (and if memory serves me correctly KMail), and I am sure many other email programs. I am not sure about file managers under Linux though.
Thanks for pointing that out *grin*. My theory still stands of course (probably to be debunked very soon by somebody who knows what they are talking about).
That's presuming you have a known plaintext. That's usually not too hard to engineer, but with careful implementation, it should actually be very hard.
I agree, but there is always a chance. Of course you could enter quantum plaintext which is trial encrypted by a quantum key and then retrieve it that way:)
First, symmetric key encryption is still pretty good in the face of quantum computing. It isn't as good as it was. I think the difficulty factor goes down to the square root of the original difficulty factor. For a 256 bit key, that's sitll 2^128 operations to brute force it. That's pretty secure.
Surely you can just perform 256 trial encryptions of known plaintext to retrieve the key?
As for the latency / security thing, I am only going on at least second hand information and I sit corrected:)
All connections are point to point, we just use routers, switches, hubs and bridges to manage the traffic.
Moving away from the cryptographic arguments for just a moment, you could share a quantum entangled pair with your ISP. They could use pairs to replace current links, so you end up with a system which is only slowed down by switching latency. Just imagine a cross world (or even from here to Mars) link with zero latency... Martian Quake!
Slashdot Mirror
The BBC only licences programs to be broadcast within a 7 day window, which is why the DRM is required for the IMP to get off the ground. For programs the BBC produces it is their choice if they want to make them available for longer, but I dare say that few of them are 100% BBC these days - news probably contains clips from other providers, sport broadcasts are probably licenced from the people hosting the event etc.
Actually you can create your own game profiles to enable SLI. They are stored in an XML file to hack in the System32 directory called NvApps.xml.
Aren't ARM and Via both based outside the US? You could build a quiet cluster :-)
It makes sense to do away with having your console being the place where your saves games are and tie it to an on line player profile. Mobile profiles are possible with memory cartrages but it involves hassle. Being able to continue your Halo campaign around your friends place by entering your login details is far nicer than having to take anything physical with you.
The possiblilty of custom settings for all your games being instantly accessable to you as long as you have a net connection is a great idea, but I don't know if MS are removing the hard disk for this reason. It is possible that because they are moving into the home entertainment business they will want to sell you a PVR as well. If this was a software addon to the XBox 2 then you could pirate it, but it is harder when there is no hard disk. If they get the PVR expansion to authenticate against the XBox 2 (which would basically be a video in and a hard disk in a matching box) then they keep the option secure. Of course you would have to hack your XBox 2 to get the new encoder working if they did hardware authentication anyway, but as has been pointed out no hard disk is a great cost saving. Selling a hard disk as an extra to turn your XBox 2 into a media centre (for which they all ready have an OS) is a good business idea. Of course nobody will want one if it is as ugly as the current XBox.
Myself I will stick with emulating classics and MythTV (when I get it working, KnoppMyth will either receive praise or curses tomorrow when I erase Windows from my PVR).
Konspire2b looks like a better option than BitTorrent for distributing news. You could have a channel mapping to an RSS feed and just wait for the news to come to you. No polling intervals and low bandwidth requirements for the operator. With BitTorrent you still have to poll for updates and this removes that requirement.
Remember that putting email addresses in pictures meens that only people who can read the picture can email you. This excludes anyone who has their computer read the screen for them from contacting you. It is far better to have a contact form on your site that emails you - it will still hide the email address. If you have a domain and want to use a mailto then you can simply change the contact email address when it gets too drowned in SPAM and either bounce messages or simply delete them using your favourite mail processor.
If you want to not only filter out SPAM easily but also track who sold out then get a domain and when you sign up for something that requires an email address then put an ID in the address you use, for example user-site_url@domain.com - this way you can filter out spam from just one source and also stop reading (and thus supporting) junk mail from the offending web site. You can even sue the pants off the web site if the law permits and you really care that much.
Forget the mobo - AGPx4 Vs AGPx8 doesn't make a huge difference at the moment with games, and even if the NV30 cards drop to $200 I would still like to be able to hear the lovingly created sound track by Trent Reznor - go for the $180 ATI card - it is better for your ears ^_^
Well according to this it just spams Gnutella clients! I wouldn't bother if I were you, unless you want irritated users disconnecting you from the network.
eDonkey 2000 / http://www.sharereactor.com do this. The eDonkey network works by using links (as in clickable on web pages) that contain MD4 sums of the file + file size to let users know about files on the network. It does have some searching capabilities but they are limited. This is persumably fixed in the new Overnet project the guy is doing.
The files are all downloaded in segments from multiple sources, and you sometimes get bad segments, but they are only a fraction of the total file size so you don't really care.
You just plain can't poison eDonkey / Overnet - it won't work. It is also the only network that I would be tempted to use to distribute real content since it is guaranteed that the user will get what you want them to.
If you have these keys, the security is broken completely and you can do whatever you want. Getting them is the hard part.
This is, as I understand it, not completely the case. I doubt that the Pd machine would let unsigned software have access to storage that it is not allowed to. You could get around this if you take the hard disk out of the Pd machien and put it in a non-Pd machine of course. You are then in a situation that if you want to circumvent the DRM on a file then you have to pull out the disk it is stored on and decrypt the file. If you used a VM then you wouldn't have to do that. You wouldn't even need a Pd PC if you could get a key (say, from your X-Box 2).
Of course you could try something insane like a known plaintext attack by saving a text file, removing the disk it is stored on, and attacking that.
If I had all the computers in all the world...
It is more a case of if you can create valid Pd keys, then you are home free.
If you can't (MS distributes them, and signs them, with signatures publicly available for all keys linked to UIN's or something) then you could, for instance, use the trick of differential power analysis to identify the key (which is fixed in most smart cards these days, but used to be a problem) then you can clone a Pd system. If you owned the system, then who would know?
As long as you decrypt stuff and erase any signing / watermarks etc, you can upload stuff to P2P systems if you want. I wasn't thinking of that though, just creating a system to allow fair use. I won't go into the fair use rant here because I am sure eveyone has heard it many times before.
The latest Crypto-Gram has some things to day about Pd, or Palladium as the full name goes. It is interesting, but it doesn't say anything about somthing that sprang to my mind - the possibility of a virtual machine that runs as a Pd device, on top of a non-Pd device, completely breaking the security. This would be hard to do I expect, but not impossible. Those who have written VmWare and similar programs probably have it in them to reverse engineer the protocols used and re-produce them in software, for the sake of argument call it VmPd.
It goes like this:
VmPd runs on a PC, VmPd contains all keys required to access all areas of itself. VmPd is trusted, because it is a trusted PC (which is the point of this whole mess) to do what it is expected to do. For the sake of argument assume we have downloaded The Little Mermaid under license from Disney, and we are only allowed to play it once. We turn off VmPd, and all we have is an encrypted jumble on our hard disk where we set up the partition to host it. We also have the keys to read it though, and simply decrypt the move and show it to our hypothetical little children as many times as we like.
This works because, as I understand it, Pd only allows you to access material with certain rights, depending on what access partition it is under. If Disney set up an access partition for downloading movies, this will be done in a way that trusts your Pd machine.
Assuming that Disney only give you a key when you pay for one, that key will always work unless they can chance how the movie is encrypted. It is conceivable that they would have a player that on-the-fly re-encrypts the movie with a new public key as you view it, every time you view it, and they only give you the new private key when you pay for it. But the transmission of the key is encrypted, trusted because you have a Pd device, so you just intercept the key on its way into VmPd, don't play the movie, and decrypt it yourself and watch as many times as you like.
I am probably missing something, but it makes for interesting thinking.
I am sure I have heard of someone doing this before in software, but I can't find a link. It should be quite simple to do if you know bit widths and track diameters I guess. As long as Yamaha haven't patented it I can see this turning up as a plug in for CD writer software quite quickly.
This will probably start turning up on ISO's soon, and it would be cool to have a nice Debian mini-CD ISO hacked to say "Woody" in the unused space! Of course, now we have the possible pain of ISO adverts...
I will give that a go. Basically I ran ./configure and make it. Silly of me to assume that since it runs like a pig without the mit-shm option, it would build with it enabled by default!
...but a little slow on Solaris 8. Maybe it is just me, but my build of Mozilla really jerkey on a workstation (UltraSPARK III, 2G RAM). On the other hand The Gimp runs like a dream on my Windows box, and Mozilla is zappy on Linux.
--
Dooferlad
They have made evolutionary electronic devices. I seem to remember it was a New Scientist article but I don't have a copy to hand. An FPGA was trained to differentiate between two frequencies, which was accomplished with far fewer gates than traditional designes, and the final array contained a block of gates that weren't linked to the main block, which if removed stopped the device from functioning.
Come on! This has to happen! Rob and Jeff host a telethon webcast[1], complete with slow, soft focus pictures of the Slashdot servers with CG smoke coming out of them... of course since they will be in the same place to get behind a web-cam together to do this show they could do another Geeks In Space! *g,dr*
[1] I know this will cost bandwidth, but stick with it, my story gets better.
Dooferlad
Most comments posted so far are looking at this from the point of view of people creating different laws for Cyberspace. This isn't really in the spirit of the ruling. The point is that Voyeur Dorm wasn't selling sexually explicit material in a particular area where it was banned. This doesn't mean that I, in the UK, can import pr0n on the net, and say it is OK because it is in cyberspace. The point is that cyberspace sales don't affect the people in the area directly by changing the atmosphere of the area (the law that was being challenged was to do with keeping sales of a sexually explicit nature away from residential areas, because it changes the mood of the area for the worse). You can't just use this ruling to say "DECSS doesn't break the law, because the law doesn't apply to cyberspace", the law does (in all the places I know of at any rate).
-- Dooferlad
PGP is still very good encryption, and I use it regularly. I mostly use it on my Win2k box, but GPG will do the same job under Linux.
As for how easy it is to use, on Windows it is on the file context menu, allowing you to encrypt and erase files in just a couple of clicks. In Outlook you can tell it to encrypt / sign your emails automatically for you.
This ease of use is not limited to Windows though, GPG plugs into Mutt as well (and if memory serves me correctly KMail), and I am sure many other email programs. I am not sure about file managers under Linux though.
-- Dooferlad
:p
Thanks for pointing that out *grin*. My theory still stands of course (probably to be debunked very soon by somebody who knows what they are talking about).
-- Dooferlad
I agree, but there is always a chance. Of course you could enter quantum plaintext which is trial encrypted by a quantum key and then retrieve it that way
Some useful background on Quantum Entanglement and Quantum Communication can be found at the Centre For Quantum Communications for confused readers (like me).
-- Dooferlad
As for the latency / security thing, I am only going on at least second hand information and I sit corrected
-- Dooferlad
All connections are point to point, we just use routers, switches, hubs and bridges to manage the traffic.
Moving away from the cryptographic arguments for just a moment, you could share a quantum entangled pair with your ISP. They could use pairs to replace current links, so you end up with a system which is only slowed down by switching latency. Just imagine a cross world (or even from here to Mars) link with zero latency... Martian Quake!
-- Dooferlad